Page:An answer to a pamphlet, intitled, "Thoughts on the causes and consequences of the present high price of provisions" in a letter, addressed to the supposed author of that pamphlet.djvu/4

( 2 ) enabled to pay them. To know the cause and nature of a disease, is a requisite step towards effecting a cure, as well in politics as in physic; but unless that knowledge leads to a cure, it will be so far from diminishing, that it will rather increase the complaints of the unhappy sufferer. And this effect, most surely, it will ever produce, when we are sensible, that our disease is owing, not to our own folly or negligence, nor to the necessary course of human affairs, but to the ignorance, stupidity, or try of those who are intrusted with our safety. What, let me ask you, would you think of a physician, who, being called to visit a patient lying on a sick-bed, should gravely tell him, that his distemper was occasioned by an unhappy concurrence of untoward circumstances, assisted by some medicines, which the physician himself had given him; but that the malady was incurable, and would soon put a period to his exist- ence